


everything's burning (nothing's on fire)

by BeggarWhoRides



Series: vampire, interred [1]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Blood and Injury, F/F, Historical Inaccuracy, Insanity, Mentions of Suicide, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 23:43:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2486648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeggarWhoRides/pseuds/BeggarWhoRides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After two months, she stops screaming.</p><p>A brief foray into the mind of Carmilla during her decades buried.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everything's burning (nothing's on fire)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, reader. This is my second foray into Carmilla fanfiction, and in a very different mood than my first.
> 
> A couple warnings: There is some (somewhat graphic) self-harm described below, suicidal thoughts, murder, a lot of blood, and no real comfort. If any of that makes you uncomfortable or is triggering, please don't read this fic.
> 
> Otherwise, enjoy!.

After two months, she stops screaming.

She can't be sure it's two months. There is no day or night and therefore, maybe, no time. Just the smell of earth and blood and blackness so heavy she doesn't know if her eyes are open in a place so small she cannot move her hand to touch and check. 

She decides it is two months, because if she admits she does not know, she may go mad.

Her shrieks have been hurting her ears, she decides, and that is why she stopped. She has not given up. She will not admit that this imprisonment is a new forever. But her shrieks had been loud and unbecoming of a lady. Too much like the madwomen of legend, who tore their hair and shredded their clothes and were quietly carted away to buildings with bars and chains and then never spoken of again. 

She is not a madwoman. She is a deadwoman, and the dead do not go mad.

Another month has passed, she decides, since she stopped screaming. This cannot last much longer if three months flies by so fast.

\-----

She does not understand why she does not cease.

She hungers. She hungers like she never had reason to in life, she hungers as she never had reason to with Mother--before Elle, before betrayal, before the coffin and the black--but she does not cease to be.

 _Even vampires must eat, mausi,_ Mother had cooed, bending back the head of some noble boy, his thick veins pumping in fear. _Do not fret, he will not bite back. I saved you, mausi, you do as I say._ The boy had squirmed and cried and soiled himself; his blood had tasted sweet and thick and hot. 

She'd drained him until his color was gone and his screams long over, then left him behind the carriages as Mother took her hand and made her run. She'd shaken and sobbed and clawed at her skin, wondering what she'd become, why she'd been cursed.

A week later she'd done it again, to a copper-haired girl behind a whorehouse.

But now the hunger threatened to swallow her whole, a pit inside herself inside the pit where she lay, and she did not cease. It had been one year, she decided, since she had been interred. _Vampires must eat, mausi,_ Mother had said, and Mother was never wrong. 

Mother had said she must feed.

So she fed.

She floated in the dark, surrounded by the cloying scent of the blood Mother filled her tomb with, seeing the face of the noble boy, the whorehouse girl, the pretty servant after her, the squire, the beggar, and on, and on, and on.

She had been waiting for her feeds to catch up to her, the blood to run out, for her eyes to close (or to remain closed--she could not tell if they were open) and to be sent to her judgement at last. 

But the blood never ran dry.

 _Perhaps there is an enchantment,_ she thinks, _perhaps monsters need little food._

 _Perhaps having cheated him once,_ she thinks, _Death will not come for me again._

It is the most terrifying thought she's ever had.

\------

She cannot remember Elle's smile.

She remembers hair like the caramel candies that she so constantly ate, corkscrewing endlessly and tumbling past her shoulders, sky-blue eyes and pearl-white teeth and a dress of deep purple fabric, but she cannot remember her smile.

She remembers terror.

She remembers Elle's disgust and fear and the sight of Mother creeping out behind her, Elle's face turning to terror as Mother's hand gripped her curls, Mother scolding _oh mausi, mausi, what have you done?_

She remembers loving Elle.

She remembers Elle's screams.

If loving Elle had been real, if she had been there, in a world with things like color and light and movement and loved a girl with caramel hair, shouldn't she remember the girl's smile?

It has been ten years, she decides, maybe more, and she begins to wonder if it was all a fairy tale.

\-----

It has been ten thousand years, she thinks, and the darkness is swallowing her.

She fights it, and fights fights _fights_ it, fingers scrabbling until she can feel the nails give way and whatever monsters have within them comes gushing from her fingertips, she arches her back as far as it will go, kicks and kicks until she hears instead of feels bones snapping, she slams her head down again and again and again.

She does not scream. Madwomen scream and she is not mad she is not she is not she is not--

But if she can fight it, if she can force a change, if she kills the darkness then maybe she can find the fairytale world in her head, a world with sun and sky and light and _people,_ people with blood that's red like berries and sweet like caramel, people so she doesn't have to be alone, alone, alone.

Or maybe the darkness will win, maybe she will shatter every part of this dead-monster body she's been given into tiny tiny pieces and be done, done with the silence and blackness and loneliness, maybe gone to hell maybe to lakes of fire and eternal torment but it would not be here and that would be enough, but something must give, something must change will change has to change _must change._

When she stops _(maybe ten years later maybe two months maybe centuries)_ she is silent, and then she feels her bones knit together and her fingernails grow and then everything is back to the way it was, the darkness has not changed and she is back to the way she was, her body whole and dead, her body in a world of black and silence, her body alone.

No change.

She does not scream. Madwomen scream and she is not mad she is not she is not she is not.

She is a deadwoman.

She does not scream.

She laughs instead, laughs and laughs and the laughs bounce around in the black and back to her and if she closes her eyes _(unless they're already closed but she cannot tell, does not care anymore)_ she can pretend it's pretty girls with caramel hair laughing with her.

Sometimes she forgets she's pretending.

\-----

In the year that world-of-light-and-color called 1945, the earth was ravaged. Bombs exploded. Men exploded.

Eventually, so did her coffin.

She screamed--just for a moment, not mad not mad--when suddenly the darkness wasn't everything, when something _(sunlight, it's sunlight)_ came through the cracks, when sounds _(like thunder but not, men screaming like the noble boy of a thousand years ago)_ assaulted her ears and something like warmth tickled her skin. 

It was too much. All the sounds and sights and feelings and even the air tasted different now and it was too much, too much.

She needed more. 

She clawed at the earth, at the coffin, gasping with lungs that no longer needed air, kicking and cursing until she was lying on her front, on the dirt not in the dirt, surrounded by air and sound and heat and people, people, she wasn't alone anymore.

The girl who died in 1698 lay among the dying of 1945 and sobbed with joy.

**Author's Note:**

> Mausi=German term of endearment, meaning "little mouse"
> 
> The detail about the coffin filled with blood comes from the original novella, where the coffin of Countess Mircalla "floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed."
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! This style of writing (and the character of Carmilla, though she is meant to be a little unlike the vamp we love in this fic) is new for me, so any feedback would be absolutely welcome.


End file.
